Wicked Charlotte: The Sordid Side of the Queen City

By Stephanie Burt Williams

Bootleggers, swindlers, gold miners and serial killers Charlotte has courted them all. The Queen City is renowned for its skyline, sports teams and dizzying growth, but just below its smooth, polished exterior lies a dark past full of crime and myriad misdeeds. This second history of Charlotte has been concealed and denied by those who retell the city s story, and by those who have lived it. Until now.

In Wicked Charlotte, discover the tale of the Chicago gangsters who invaded the city looking to pull a heist to fund sinister maneuverings in their boss s criminal trial. Learn how a golden nugget found in a nearby creek changed Charlotte from a trading crossroads into a rough and tumble town full of fortune seekers bent on finding a quick dollar and instant riches. And read about the details of the death of one of Charlotte s most gifted writers, who met his end in a seedy hotel room in Mexico.

This raucous book sheds light on these incidents and many more, revealing a side of Charlotte s history that few will recognize. The sordid events described here took place on familiar streets and in well known neighborhoods, but rarely have the stories passed beyond the circles of those who lived them. Charlotte has played host to a multitude of villainous characters, and has seen scores of unsavory deeds played out on its shadowy streets. Wicked Charlotte brings it all to the forefront, as never before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781614233428

Stephanie Burt Williams

Stephanie Burt Williams was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is a fourth generation Charlottean. She has worked as a journalist at a number of publications in North and South Carolina and is the author of a book of ghost stories about Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

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INTRODUCTION

Charlotte is not necessarily considered a wicked place. Evil is not evident in the shiny buildings and tree-lined streets of the Queen City. It’s not a New Orleans, a Charleston or a Memphis that drip with folk tales around every corner, or make their tourism dollars with history tours and carriage rides. But despite the fact that it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation and it is forward thinking in much of its architecture and policies, it has a past, and a long one at that.

Charlotte was an established crossroads town by the time of the American Revolution, and the fields of Mecklenburg County surrounding it were filled with farms and plantations. It was a place with people and history, and with that history came the good and the bad. It was a rough-and-tumble place at a trading crossroads, built on commerce instead of culture from its very beginnings. Many of the same ills that affected the American South as a whole did have a place in Charlotte, both during the antebellum period and after it.

But it is its history post-1950 that really started to distinguish it from other cities. Very quickly, it went from a large Southern town to a bustling Southern city, new buildings replacing old structures in the center city as the business of banking became the business of Charlotte. Transfers and transplants started pouring in from other parts of the country, and for a while, Charlotte did not know who it was, a little Atlanta or a big Birmingham. But it is neither. It is something else—a mixture of old and new that at last is admitting its place in the past as well as the future. It is the New South City, but it has roots in the Old South and the past in general, not all pretty and not all proud.

The southwest corner of North College and East Fifth Streets in 1900. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

Charlotte is my hometown and the birthplace of my ancestors. There are wonderful people in Charlotte who will refill your tea glass without a word, smile at you in line at the bank and offer you a seat in the pew beside them at church. These are my friends, my past coworkers and my family. These are my people. But this book is not about those people.

In the history of any place, there are those who are not interested in living peacefully side by side with one another. For whatever reason, be it greed, jealously, desire of power or just plain spite, they make decisions that lead them down a path decidedly different from those Charlotteans I call neighbors. This book is about them and the deeds they did.

Although we do not want to admit it, they are part of Charlotte history too, and the filling in of their stories will make us better appreciate our own, not just for what we have, but for the things from which we have turned away.

Williams Cicero Warner Sr. (on left), my great-grandfather, and unidentified friend, circa 1910. Courtesy of W.S. Burt Family Collection.

GREED IS THE COLOR OF GOLD

GOLD MINING IN CHARLOTTE’S EARLY HISTORY

Some might say that Charlotte has always been ruled by money. It is all about what you have, what you spend and how you show it off. New neighborhoods of houses decorated like wedding cakes show off new money in areas all over the Charlotte region, from the new money glittering all along the banks of the fake Lake Norman to the neo-traditional neighborhoods of southwestern Mecklenburg County.

Old money rules the center city, and it’s not about how much you have—that’s a given—but who your mother was and where you father attended college, practices law or other such pedigrees. And if you do not have old money, there’s no way to get it, although Charlotte is a little more forgiving than a lot of traditional Southern cities. New money can become old money in as little as two generations. That is how we are, rewarding the new money for staying around.

Our tallest buildings are built by, named after and home to many of the country’s largest banks. After all, according to the Charlotte Chamber, more banking resources are headquartered in Charlotte than in all but one U.S. city. This town is focused on money—the ways to make it, manage it, what to buy with it. How did this sleepy little town at a crossroads in the North Carolina Piedmont become such a powerhouse of banking, commerce and general commercialism? Well, we came by it naturally. There was gold scattered all through the rolling hills of the Piedmont that surrounded those crossroads.

That’s right—this sleepy little crossroad held a secret of the most primal greed just below the surface. Creeks wound all throughout the countryside, and as they cut gently into the land they revealed shallow veins of gold. Gold is a shaper of nations. It drove Cortez deep into the Aztec jungles. It fueled some of the greatest wars in antiquity. And it definitely shaped the United States.

Gold, or the quest for it, brought many of the first settlers of the Southern United States to this land, and many accounts have the first pilgrims needing that first Thanksgiving meal from the Native Americans because they had squandered the harvest season carousing the Backcountry, looking for gold. But the first gold rush, that feverish migration of peoples with get rich quick shining in their eyes, was to begin in the Charlotte region.

By 1750, Charlotte was already a center of commerce, having established trade routes to the important port of Charleston, South Carolina. But it wasn’t until after the Revolutionary War that Charlotte hit upon what was to become its present legacy: riches, and especially that all-important type of wealth, the instant wealth.

THE FIRST GOLD RUSH IN AMERICA

In 1799, on or very near the line of Cabarrus County (northeast of Charlotte) and Mecklenburg County, a young boy in a German-speaking farming community decided to play hooky from church. What he came back with (instead of finding spiritual riches in the ritual and Bible verses read aloud in the Sunday service) were more earthly riches than someone of his station was ever supposed to see.

One Sunday, supposedly in the spring, Conrad Reed chose to go fishing with several siblings in Little Meadow Creek on his father’s property. It was one of the first warm days, and the boy probably had spring fever and didn’t want to attend the stern German church with his parents. As he sat busily fishing with his siblings on the creek side, something glinting in the water caught his eye. In fact he described it as a yellow substance shining in the water. Conrad was a curious boy, so, as many typical twelve-year-old boys would do, he waded in to retrieve the substance, discovered it was some sort of metal and decided to tote it home with him. The wedge-shaped rock was about the size of a small smoothing iron or flatiron. Its weight was later said to be approximately seventeen pounds.

John Reed, a farmer, was Conrad’s father. He was an illiterate Hessian mercenary from Germany—an illegal immigrant—who had deserted the British army in Savannah and made his way to backwoods North Carolina (and rural Mecklenburg County was definitely backwoods in the late 1700s), where he settled near Meadow Creek in Mecklenburg County.

Little Meadow Creek looks much as it did that day in 1799 when Conrad Reed found the first nugget of Carolina gold. Courtesy of North Carolina Historic Sites, Division of Archives and History.

In addition to being a deserter, Reed also had another dubious fact to add to his pedigree for wealth. Reed’s father and mother did public penance in the church